Closing in on his 25th guest shift of the year, it’s fair to say Rich McDonough is back on tour, some 30 years after his debut travels in Asia. A combination of flavours found abroad, techniques honed at home and the tradition of Hanoian craftsmanship has led him to heading up Workshop14, where he brings modernist methods to the Vietnamese capital’s increasingly thriving bar scene. 

The past year has moved fast. Workshop debuted on Asia’s 50 Best Bars extended list at number 83, while also receiving the nod as winners of Campari’s One to Watch award for 2025, less than seven months after opening, signalling them as one of the region’s rising stars.

As international guest shifts become progressively more important in maintaining exposure throughout an emergent continent, the invitations have begun to stack up, and travel is part of his life again - Richard’s latest passport boasts stamps from Hong Kong and Singapore to the likes of Mongolia.

“Ulaanbaatar was probably the most unexpected, but I’ve always loved to travel,” he says “Guest shifts let me see new places guided by insiders. The best bars, great food, things you don’t find as a tourist. Sometimes the pace is a bit much for an old man like me, but it’s some of the best travel I’ve enjoyed.” 

Early travels

It’s all a long way from McDonough’s beginnings, working at a department store in the recession ravaged London of the early nineties. After over a hundred failed graduate applications, enough was enough. “I made it to the last six, out of over 20,000 applicants for an environmental management scheme, walked out of the interview around the corner and straight into STA travel,” he recalls. £370 lighter, he was armed with a one-way ticket for an adventure that’s never really ended. 

McDonough arrived in Phnom Penh in July of 1993 when the city was buoyant in the wake of the UN election. Officials, soldiers and journalists were living on foreign salaries in a pre-internet city that ran on news from the Bangkok Post.

For McDonough, bars arrived by accident. “I’d never worked in a bar before, let alone managed one.” The Gecko Club came first, opening beers and mixing gin and tonics for UN staff and reporters. When the Foreign Correspondents’ Club opened, the journalists followed, and his evenings moved there. At The Cambodia Daily, he typed New York Times feeds sent by fax for four dollars an hour, before The Phnom Penh Post finally called with an advertising manager role. There, he would write copy, act as art director, and when space allowed, slip office anecdotes into a horoscope column as Madam Zaza.

In 1996 he took those commission savings to launch Design Group, an advertising agency which he ran until its sale in 2010. Life moved again during that time: meeting his future wife, following her initially to Hanoi and later to Ghana.

“I couldn’t legally work so Ghana inadvertently gave me room to experiment. I did a little consultancy between looking after my newly born twins, tending to the veggie garden and keeping chickens. More to the point, I fell for early modernist cooking when home sous vide still felt like the edge.”

Kitchen techniques led to increasingly elaborate dinner parties, and soon the dinners became cocktails after realising that drinks scaled better than a homemade tasting menu.

The Mood Therapist

Back in Hanoi, friend and bar owner Giles Cooper booked him for his first paid bartending gig; “a hundred bucks, just to see if I could pull it off.”

From there, a Christian Dior brand director booked him for another event a fortnight later and that brought Moët Hennessy to the table. They supplied a bar and equipment for a marketing campaign shot in his house alongside Vietnamese celebs - the project left him with the kit and a renewed interest.

“I bought a centrifuge with the proceeds of my early endeavours, which lived on the living-room table for six months, much to my wife’s delight.” He pushed into pressure infusion, clarification and carbonation. Dave Arnold’s podcast became a guide years before Liquid Intelligence and opportunities to stage at London’s Drinks Factory and José Andrés’ Barmini in Washington DC showed him what precision looked like at the top.

He also needed a name that fit. “I didn’t feel like a bartender, and mixologist felt pretentious.” For the Dior gig, he printed cards and wrote his own title. “The guests left happier than when they arrived. I was in advertising and copywriting, of course I coined it.” His new moniker, The Mood Therapist, stuck.

After the success of a Breaking Bad themed month at The French Grill and his “group therapy sessions” across Hanoi, he became resident host of the monthly “Liquid Laboratory” at InterContinental Westlake for four years.

Workshop14 came together when Cương Nguyễn and Hiếu Lương Trung of Hanoi’s The Haflington (Vietnam’s first bar to rank within Asia’s 50 Best) approached him. “They don’t mess around. They know how to get things done and we built a vision.”

The brief is crisp: ancient city, modern methods. Salute Hanoi’s history of craft by applying fresh techniques to local ingredients, creating concoctions from the lab.

“People talk about the lab. There is no mystique to it. The lab is the old bar,” he says. The Moët Hennessy funded rig still anchors the experimentation but now it’s ringed with tools, including what he considers the Rolls-Royce of rotovaps from Büchi.

From the lab, the bar’s menu leans on house-made ingredients over classic mixology.

 “I’ve never really been a bartender, I didn’t know the rules, so I’ve never been bound by any,” he explains. In that ethos, McDonough enlisted Jason White, former director of fermentation at Noma, for a two-week stint to help the team build a programme that is consistent, safe, scalable and, crucially, delicious.

“I have a notes app full of ideas and want the lab time to move them on or kill them”. The advice to younger bartenders tracks with the journey: “find work you enjoy, throw yourself at it, and put the hours in. Progress is incremental, the skills and understanding take time”.

Ask if he saw the success coming and he shakes his head. “I didn’t expect the department store, or the Phnom Penh Post, or cocktails. My priority has always been my kids. This is the first time the drinks have been a reliable, consistent living.” For now, Workshop14 is the proof: a Hanoi bar that treats technique as craft and hospitality as the point. The Mood Therapist is busy, and the invitations keep coming.

AF Reeves is a Hanoi-based freelance writer, lifestyle columnist and commentator in the national media covering Vietnam’s rapidly evolving food and beverage scene